


Dokma Science

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [33]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cheating at Gambling, Connections through the Force, Dokma, Dokma Races, Ezra has a terrible sense of humor, Gen, Hobbie is a bad influence, I have no idea what the drinking age would be there, Mentions of the Bendu, Or trying to, Underage Drinking, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger, Zeb's secret waffle stash, or if they even have one, well maybe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-09 12:18:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11104428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: When he learns about Ezra's ability to connect to other creatures using the Force, Hobbie comes up with a way of using it to their mutual advantage.  If only Ezra can get it to work.





	1. Chapter 1

“Hey, long time no… how’s it going?”

Hobbie was smiling, but his fingers tapped nervously on his thigh and his eyes darted around the place as though searching for something else to look at so that he didn’t have to look Ezra in the eye.

Ezra shrugged. As weird reactions went, it wasn’t the worst one he’d had. “Okay,” he said.

It was true; so far, today hadn’t been too bad. Not wanting a repeat of last night, when he had been so obvious about his moping that Kanan had taken it upon himself to coax him out of his room, Ezra had ventured out into the base early, resolving to stay there for as long as possible. He wasn’t actually avoiding Kanan, but not being around him did mean there was no chance of having to talk about what had happened the night before.

With one exception, other people had left him alone too. That had been by design; he had kept himself as out of the way as possible. He had only had one conversation all day, not counting the usual ‘good morning’ stuff before he headed out, and it had been a strange one, but not too bad. Less uncomfortable than it should have been, given the subject matter. The woman that had approached him clearly carried her own pain with her. He didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t want to know, but it was good to know that someone understood. Someone other than Kanan, of course.

Other than that, wherever he looked, he had found people getting on with their daily lives, paying no attention to him at all. There had been the occasional conversation that stopped as he approached, or a strange look from someone that he didn’t really know, but for the most part things felt normal.

Well, more like an imitation of normal, but it felt as though everybody was at least playing along, and the chances were good that most of them weren’t actually playing. It had been that way when he and Kanan had returned from Malachor. There had been shock at first, there had been whispers and rumors, speculation and stupid questions. And then, slowly, it had gone away. Old news.

It was good, in a way; but in another… No. It was good. He didn’t want people to talk about him, not for that reason, anyway. Still, at the same time, for the subject to be so easily dismissed felt wrong. Like it wasn’t important.

It _was_ important.

But, he supposed, it wasn’t important to _them_. Outside of his immediate circle of family and friends, the information had been nothing more than an interesting anecdote, one most people had already, apparently, managed to assimilate into their mental picture of him.

“This must be some new version of ‘okay’ that I’ve never heard before,” Hobbie told him. “Because you look…” he stopped suddenly, eyes wide, as though in panic. He looked around again, and his eyes settled on one of the dokma as it made its way past them. “Hey, is it me or are there less of those things around today?”

Ezra followed Hobbie’s gaze to see what he was talking about, then glanced around him. There did seem to be fewer creatures. Maybe they had finally decided to move on to wherever it was they were going. Good, the stupid things hadn’t made the walk back to the base any easier the night before, and he wouldn’t have even been out there if it hadn’t been for them.

“If they’re planning on leaving, I can’t say I’ll be sorry,” Hobbie added. “The engineers will, though. The obstacle courses were just getting popular, but if the dokma go back to their usual uncooperative selves, that’ll be the end of that. Have you been to them yet?”

Ezra shook his head.

“They’re okay,” Hobbie continued with a dismissive shrug. “I still like the races better though; it was good when everyone got together in one place and you knew who was going to be there, now there’s all these different little groups, it’s just not the same, you know?”

“Sure.” Ezra nodded, and rubbed at an itch on the side of his head. “Like you said though, they probably won’t be around too much longer, if the dokma are starting to move on. Things should go back to normal soon.” He hoped. It would be nice to be able to walk around outside again without having to plan every step, and that was when it was light out. He had clipped a flashlight to his belt before heading out that morning, just in case. He didn’t plan on being caught out after dark again, but just the fact that it was there made him a little feel better.

“Pretty warm today, isn’t it?” Hobbie asked. “But I guess it’s never actually _cold_ here, is it? We really lucked out with this place. Some of the planets I’ve visited… Hey, did you hear the rumor that there’s some kind of a monster in the desert? Not the krykna, something else. People swear they’ve seen rock formations open their eyes! Well actually it was only one person, but still.”

Ezra frowned. Had Hobbie heard? The chances were slim that he hadn’t, after all, the information was everywhere by now; but he hadn’t mentioned it. The tone of the conversation was strange, though. There was a kind of nervousness to Hobbie’s voice, a desperation to fill the silence with chatter, as though trying to avoid the subject. It was something that Ezra did himself, and something that he had done often over the past few weeks. He had never realized how obvious it was. Or how annoying.

It wasn’t like Ezra _wanted_ to talk about it, but this might actually be worse. It felt like they were pretending, and not pretending well, that nothing was wrong. 

Hobbie folded and then unfolded his arms, fidgeted with his collar, and glanced around him again, probably looking for another subject to move onto. “Wedge got back from the Cathonie system yesterday,” he said. “Apparently the mission was a success. So, that’s good. Hey, do you…”

Ezra took a deep breath. “Hobbie?” he said, cutting him off mid-sentence.

“Yeah?”

“You’ve heard, right?”

Hobbie went very quiet for a moment, then folded his arms for a second time. “About…?” He nodded. “Yeah, I heard.”

Ezra was surprised to feel relief at that. At least if Hobbie knew, there were no secrets between them. At least he didn’t have to worry about him finding out later that day and wondering why Ezra hadn’t brought it up, or him somehow managing to miss the information completely. Because that happened when information spread; someone always had to be the last to know.

Hobbie shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and appeared to be inspecting the ground just in front of his feet. “You okay?” he asked.

Ezra shrugged. There wasn’t an easy answer to that question. “I guess,” he said.

It wasn’t a good answer, but it was better than he had managed the past few times, so it was progress at least. And he hadn’t changed the subject to the races. Yet. Probably because Hobbie had beaten him to it.

“That’s good,” Hobbie said. He licked his lips and took a deep breath, arms still folded, still looking at the ground. It felt very much like the conversation was over.

“What’s going on at the races anyway, with the dokma acting like this?” Ezra asked. “Last time I went, they were trying to escape up the side of the track.”

Hobbie visibly relaxed at the change of subject. He shrugged. “They’re still doing that a bit. But eventually they give up and just do what they always do.”

“Stand around not racing?” Ezra said.

Hobbie grinned. “It’s still better than the obstacle courses. Half the time they’re in there, they’re in a tunnel or something and you can’t even see th…” he stopped abruptly, cheeks coloring. He cleared his throat theatrically, as though the urge to do so was what had stopped him speaking. “So, yeah, the races are better,” he muttered.

Ezra’s heart was pounding double-time. He wrapped his arms around his own body and tried to control his breathing, release the emotions into the Force. It didn’t work. It never worked when he needed it. It barely worked when he was sitting alone with his eyes closed. “You’re allowed to say ‘see’,” he said quietly.

“I know.” Hobbie was one giant ball of tension, so much so that without trying, Ezra could feel it radiating from him. “I wasn’t _not_ saying it, I was…” he stopped again, and sighed, defeated.

Ezra drew a line on the ground with the tip of his boot. “Trust me,” he said. “After Kanan, I tried… Look, it’s _possible_ to never use any of those words, but it’s really awkward and it draws more attention to it than just talking normally. So don’t, okay? Please?” He was going for a light, joking tone, but he didn’t feel it, and he heard that come across in his voice.

Hobbie took a deep breath and steeled himself. “Okay. What I was saying is, you can’t _see_ the dokma,” he said. “When they’re in tunnels on the obstacle courses, so you just end up standing around staring at a piece of tubing or something, because they go inside and then decide to stay there a while, so you’re just looking at this thing and wondering why you didn’t just go watch the races instead.”

Ezra smirked and held out one hand to count on his fingers as he spoke. “See, look, stare, watch…You know, you didn’t have to use _that_ many.”

Hobbie flinched as though he had hit him.

“No, sorry!” Ezra stuttered. “It was a joke. I was…” he sighed, frustrated. Too soon, he supposed. But then, when _would_ he be able to make jokes again? It was one more thing that had been taken from him and he wanted it back. He ran his fingers quickly through his hair. “I was just messing with you. Sorry.”

Hobbie looked at him appraisingly, as though analyzing him in some way. “Well, nothing’s changed there then, your sense of humor is as terrible as ever.”

Ezra scowled. “Hey, my sense of humor is excellent, it’s all you guys who just don’t understand it!”

“We understand it, we just understand how awful it is.”

“I’m thinking you mean ‘awfully good’.”

Hobbie shrugged. “Keep telling yourself that, one day it might even come true. I mean, it probably won’t, but nothing’s impossible, right?”

Ezra grinned. “I guess not. One day you might even win that helmet back from me. I mean, it’s _really_ unlikely, but like you said, not impossible.”

“I’m getting that helmet back,” Hobbie said.

“Just keep telling yourself that,” Ezra said, repeating Hobbie’s own words back to him.

Hobbie started to laugh, and Ezra allowed himself a moment to breath a sigh of relief before joining in. Things were going to be okay after all.

Well, some things. Not all the things. Plenty of things were not going to be okay, but if he could turn the disaster that had been _this_ conversation around, Hobbie might be right, nothing was impossible.

Hobbie took a deep breath and stopped laughing. “Hey, Ezra,” he said. Ezra was still grinning when he turned to look at him in response, but the smile faltered just slightly when he saw Hobbie’s suddenly more serious expression. “Can Kanan fly?” he continued. "Using the Force, I mean.”

Ezra frowned, suddenly struck by the image of Kanan lifting himself from the ground, propelled upward and onward by the power of the Force. He almost laughed out loud, although actually, _was_ it such a farfetched idea? He and Kanan had used the Force to propel each other through the air, why not themselves?

“No, I’m pretty sure he can’t,” he said. “He’d have shown me if he could, and I’d have got him to teach me. He can jump pretty far, though.” He thought about it carefully. “I don’t think he’s ever even mentioned actual _flying_ though, like whether it’s possible. I’ll have to ask him.” It probably wasn’t.

Hobbie frowned. “Okay, not that that wouldn’t be pretty great, but that’s not the kind of flying that I meant,” he said. “You know, like flying a ship?”

“Oh. Right.” Ezra felt himself begin to blush. “Uh, why?”

Hobbie shrugged and looked down at his feet, and Ezra felt a pang of sympathy for him; he clearly didn’t want to say what he was thinking any more than Ezra wanted to hear it.

“No,” Ezra said, quickly. “I mean, maybe he _could_ , somehow. But I don’t think he’s tried it, not since Malachor, or if he has, he hasn’t mentioned it.” Which would mean that it probably hadn’t gone so well.

Hobbie nodded slowly, absorbing that, and then frowned, curious. “What’s ‘Malachor’?” he asked.

Ezra blinked in surprise. For so long he had used that one word to encapsulate the horror that had been that place, the terrible things that had happened there and the pain and uncertainty of the months that followed. Somehow, he had forgotten that to most people, the word meant nothing. It had as little meaning to Hobbie as it had to himself the first time he had heard it spoken.

“A planet,” he began. He shook his head. “It’s a long story. But that’s where it happened. Where we were when Kanan lost h…” His throat closed up, stopping the words against his will. _Where Kanan had lost his sight, where they had lost Ahsoka, whom Hobbie had never known. Where Ezra had made the mistakes that had allowed it all to…_

“Wait,” Hobbie’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “You were there when Kanan was hurt? That puts it a lot more recent than I thought. The way he does, you know, everything. I assumed it must have been years ago.”

“I guess it was maybe about a year.” Ezra didn’t know the exact date. That was probably for the best; to know it, to find it out, would have been to allow it to become some kind of anniversary, a date to be commemorated, commiserated, brought up again year after year, even if it was only inside his own head. That wouldn't help anybody; better to let it pass unnoticed, uncommented.

Hobbie was looking at him with a mixture of awe and incredulity, like he knew Ezra wouldn’t lie about that, but still couldn’t quite believe it anyway. Sometimes, it was easy for Ezra to forget what a relatively short amount of time he had known Hobbie and Wedge. Hobbie was right to be impressed. He might have been even more impressed if he had seen Kanan in the months following Malachor.

Hobbie leaned in a little closer, glancing around him as he did, checking for prying ears. “What happened?” he asked.

Just for a moment, to keep the attention on somebody else for a few moments longer, Ezra considered answering. Not with the full story, of course, but some abbreviated version of it, something that would answer the question without sharing unnecessary information, things that Kanan -- and that Ezra himself -- wouldn't want people to know. He resisted the temptation; this wasn’t the time, and it wasn’t his story alone to tell.

“Another time, maybe,” he said, emphasizing the last word. It was in no way a promise, and he was sure that Hobbie understood that.

Hobbie nodded. “Well, I don’t know a lot about the Jedi, but if he can do _that_ in less than a year, you’re gonna be fine.”

Ezra looked away. It wasn’t _like_ that. He wasn’t Kanan, and nobody seemed to be able to understand that. What had happened to Kanan and what was happening to him were not the same, and even if they were, he wouldn’t have been able to do what Kanan had; he didn’t have the background of years and years of training that Kanan did. He still had trouble sitting still for long enough to meditate, and it had gotten so much worse recently. Lately, he could barely quiet his mind for long enough to drift off to sleep; a crushing terror -- one that he could barely bring himself to admit to -- lingered in the background all the time, and without a distraction, if he let his guard down, it might get inside.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I should be,” he said.

It was easier to lie. There was no point getting into that whole thing now; the conversation was already teetering on the edge of awkward, and he was coping unusually well, but there was no point pushing it over into unbearable if he didn’t have to.

“But he can’t fly,” Hobbie said.

“No,” Ezra said dully. “I guess not.”

It made sense that Hobbie would keep dwelling on that one fact; he was a pilot, just like Hera. To them, the ability to fly meant freedom. It meant being in control of their own destiny. But it was more than that, more than the ability to take yourself out of any given situation without having to ask or pay for assistance. Ezra had seen the look in Hera’s eye when she spoke about flying; about the feeling of being behind the controls of a starship, plotting a course, anticipating obstacles and enemy moves, planning out maneuvers before she even realized that she needed to make them, pushing the limits of what other people believed was possible.

Sometimes, he wondered whether Hera — and perhaps all pilots — had a touch of Force sensitivity. It would explain a lot.

Ezra was only just beginning to understand that feeling that she had spoken about, the one that she had been unable to put into words. He was glad of that, glad that that wouldn't be another thing that he would have to lose.

He shrugged, plastered on a smile and didn’t make eye contact. “Flying’s overrated anyway,” he said. “And it’s not like there’s a shortage of pilots around here. I was never that great at it, so if that’s what you’re getting at, it’s fine.”

Hobbie didn’t appear convinced. “Not great? Well, no.” He grinned. “But you’re not bad. Well, not _that_ bad. You’ve even been getting pretty okay at it the last few months with Hera teaching you. She’s gonna carry on with that, right?”

Ezra shrugged again. There wasn’t much else he could do, it wasn’t like that was going to be negotiable, especially when he was still grounded from missions. _“Hey, Hera. So, I know Sato doesn’t trust me to go on missions, but how do you think he’d feel about me flying around in one of the Rebellion’s small supply of ships? I promise it’ll be fine…”_

“You should talk to her about it,” Hobbie added.

“Nah,” Ezra shook his head, still feigning disinterest. “Not a lot of point really — waste of resources when I won’t be able to do it for long. She’d be better training someone else.” He smirked and looked Hobbie directly in the eye. “Like you. I bet you could be a half-decent pilot with the right training.”

At Hobbie’s scowl, Ezra’s smirk morphed into a grin. The pilot folded his arms and glared at him, but didn't rise to the bait. “A lot of piloting is interpreting readouts and course plotting,” he said. “There’s gotta be tech out there somewhere that could help. And the rest of it, well, you could have a co-pilot.”

Tech that, even if it did exist, would be expensive and difficult to get hold of. They had trouble getting some of the things they needed as it was; throw specialist equipment that might not even exist into the mix, and it wasn’t going to make things any better. And having to rely on someone else to go with him everywhere he went would make the whole thing pointless anyway; he might as well get someone to take him, than do a substandard job himself and have someone pick up the slack.

Ezra shook his head. Maybe there was some way that he would be able to get up there and fly about, training, but when it came to an actual mission, there would always be somebody better. And that was only if Hobbie was right, and the technology was out there somewhere. Developing that kind of thing wasn’t going to be a priority for the Empire, which would make it old, and difficult to come by. “I’m not really interested in flying,” he lied, quickly and dismissively. “I’m going to have enough to learn anyway.” He heard a bitter note in his own voice that he hadn’t meant to put there.

Hobbie nodded, looking chastised as he realized that it was probably time to drop the subject. He looked away, back at Ezra, and then away again. “So, what else is going on? Overheard anything interesting?” he asked. “What have you been up to the past few days?”

Ezra hesitated, trying to work out exactly what Hobbie was asking. Was he trying to change the subject, asking Ezra to choose something else to talk about, or was he continuing the same conversation down a slightly different path, wondering whether Ezra had been learning any of those things that he had mentioned already, and how it was going?

Unfortunately, whatever the answer, Ezra had no idea how to respond. All he had known since he had last spoken to Hobbie — since before then, actually — was what was happening to him, and how it was affecting the people that he cared about. All he had done the last couple of days was hide, and sulk, and all he had learned was that he was barred from missions. He didn’t want to talk about any of that. Conversations had used to flow, without anybody having to think to hard about it. He wondered if he would ever get that back, and how long it would take.

“I made a connection to a dokma last night,” he tried. It wasn’t the best thing to talk about, because Hobbie couldn’t possibly understand what he meant by that, not really, but it was the only thing that he could think of, and as long as he steered clear of what happened afterward, it was a safe topic.

Hobbie, for his part, did appear interested. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I, uh… It’s a Force thing, hard to explain. But I can connect to other creatures, kind of understand what…” he stopped and shook his head. “I could tell where it was without looking,” he said. “I could get an impression of what it was think… not thinking, they don’t really _think_ , but what it wanted, why it’s here, that kind of stuff.”

Hobbie looked at him, fascinated and inexplicably excited. “Can you make it do things?” he asked.

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Hobbie said. “Move along a racetrack, for example?”

Ezra felt his eyes widen as the possibilities occurred to him. He grinned, but shook his head. “I don’t think I can,” he said. “They’re so simple, I don’t think they’d even understand what I was trying to make them do.”

Hobbie shrugged. “Try it,” he suggested. He made a show of glancing around, “I bet you could find a dokma around here somewhere.”

Ezra looked around too. There was no shortage of the creatures, and he selected one that was making way its past, inches from his toes. He reached out to it in the same way that he had the previous night, finding its simple mind instantly. Gently, he pushed a little harder than he had before, no longer lingering on the outskirts of its mind but moving a little closer, clouding its judgement in the same way he would a person, while using the mind trick. He tried to issue a single command. Stop.

The creature continued on its way, either not noticing, or not acknowledging the request. He tried again, closing his eyes and mouthing the word this time, imagining the creature’s forward motion grinding to a halt. Through their connection, he could still feel the creature's location as it moved further and further away. “Nope,” he said, and opened his eyes. 

Hobbie frowned. “Well,” he said, “let's think about this. There’s got to be some way we can use it.”

“Some way _I_ can use it, you mean,” Ezra said.

Hobbie shrugged. “The way I see it, it’s my idea, I should get at least half the benefit.”

Ezra laughed. “Sure,” he said. “As long as you remember that half of nothing is still nothing.”


	2. Chapter 2

“What about that one?”

They were standing well out of the way of the main areas of the base, toward the perimeter, behind a few empty storage crates that hadn’t yet been moved or refilled. The crates made for good cover; unless someone actually went over there -- and they would have no reason to do so other than moving the crates -- they weren’t going to be noticed. That was good, because being noticed would mean answering questions. It wasn’t like they weren’t _allowed_ to be investigating the dokma; after all, Ezra was still off duty, and Hobbie had finished his shift and had a little downtime. The problem was that if anybody worked out the reason they were investigating the dokma, neither of them, but especially Ezra, would ever be welcome at the races again.

Ezra turned his head to look at Hobbie, and then back again to follow his pointing finger to find the victim that he had chosen. The dokma wasn’t doing anything, simply sitting there, its eye stalks waving around as it appeared to take in the scene around it Without moving anything but its eyes, it appeared to be able to see all the way around, including directly behind itself.

Ezra wondered what it must be like to be able to do that. He was beginning to notice the gaps in his vision now. Not long ago, the reduction in his peripheral vision had been something he was aware of in theory only; he had read about it in the information he had managed to find on the early stages of Sacul Syndrome, and more recently, Noisi found it in the tests that he had performed.

He should have been able to see both Hobbie and the creature without turning his head so much, he was sure. He would have been able to, once. Or, maybe not. That could be his imagination. A false memory.

Before, he supposed, that particular issue had been the reason for at least some of the bruises on his elbows and shoulders, and was definitely the reason for the one on his hip that still hurt when he touched it. It had caused him to trip more than once because he occasionally forgot to look down, and he had learned the hard way to mind the top of his head. All this, but he had never actually seen the loss before.

That was the wrong word. He wasn’t _seeing_ it now, and that was the problem. But he was noticing it, more and more. Just the same as he was noticing other things, the way lights at night seemed to expand and distort, forming blurry shapes surrounded by a glow as though there was a mist in the air, the fact that he just couldn’t make his eyes focus on things that had been no problem the last time he had tried it.

He had increased the size of the font on his datapad by another point the night before, and it was probably going to stay there until he increased it further. He was constantly second-guessing himself, wondering whether he had really been able to see a certain thing before or whether he was misremembering, and when had he last seen it without difficulty? Had it been a year? A month? A day? It was an inaccurate way of tracking the progression of the syndrome, but it was a way that he could understand, which made it better than any data that Noisi would be able to give him.

He had been supposed to make an appointment with the droid too. Maybe even more than one by now. He didn’t feel the least bit guilty about not doing, it wasn’t like he was going to tell him anything he didn’t already know, and he could do without that mechanical voice gushing about how _fascinating_ it was that he was going to be completely blind in… however long he had. He didn’t really want to know an exact time, which was another reason not to go.

“Are you doing it?” Hobbie asked, interrupting his thoughts.

Ezra blinked in surprise and found himself still staring at the dokma that was sitting on the ground not far away from them. He glanced over at Hobbie, then back to the dokma, then reached out and connected to it through the Force.

It never ceased to amaze him how easily he could do that, especially when he considered the difficulty he had had at first. Of course, he had had difficulty with everything to do with the Force at first, and with time and practice he had improved. Hopefully, that would happen again.

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” he said, as though he had been doing that all along. He turned back to face Hobbie, while keeping his focus on the creature.

Hobbie nodded. “Does it know?” he asked. “That you’re in its head?”

“I’m not ‘in its head’,” Ezra told him. It was difficult to explain what exactly he was doing to someone that had never done it. “It’s more like… like coming to an understanding. I’m not reading its mind or anything.”

“And you still can’t make it do anything?”

Just to make sure that was true, Ezra attempted to make the dokma get up and walk somewhere. The command and the intent behind it disappeared into the Force, and he shook his head. “I don’t think they’re clever enough. Other creatures, I can calm them down, stop them attacking…”

Hobbie scoffed, presumably at the idea of a dokma attacking.

“People, I can…” he stopped and shook his head. He could influence them, cloud their judgment in the way the Kanan had taught him, make them do and think things that they wouldn’t ordinarily. He _could_ also force them to do things against their will, but he wouldn’t do that, not again. He hadn’t even used the mind trick, the one that Kanan had taught him, since he had given up the Sith holocron. It hadn’t felt right. “But no, these things are as dumb as rocks,” he said, indicating the dokma with a wave of his hand.

Hobbie was looking at him, curious. “People, you can what?” he asked.

Ezra shook his head and mumbled a reply. “Nothing.”

“Right…” His friend looked unconvinced and, not nervous exactly, but disconcerted. Concerned. He shook it off quickly. “So, this ‘understanding’ you can come to with them, what does it tell you?”

He shook his head. “Not much. I can track it, so I know where it is when I can’t… if I’m not looking at it. I get a kind of vague idea of a need to be somewhere, and the fact that it feels safe here, so it’s not in a hurry to leave.”

Hobbie nodded. “Can you do two at once?” he asked. “How about that one?”

Ezra followed the tip of Hobbie’s finger to a second dokma, minding its own business, inspecting a loose rock on the ground. Two at once was a point that he hadn’t considered. Without breaking his connection to the first creature, he reached his mind to touch the second. It worked, kind of. The connection was vague, tentative, and it took effort to maintain it. His connection with the first dokma felt the same way, like he could lose it at any moment. He held on to both tightly, trying to relax and use the Force rather than straining against it.

“Are you okay?” Ezra felt Hobbie’s hand on his shoulder and pried open his eyes. He hadn’t even realized until that moment that they had been closed. “That doesn’t look easy,” Hobbie said.

He dropped his connection to both the creatures and dragged a hand across his brow. “It’s not,” he said. But once, one wouldn’t have been easy either, and now he could do it without even thinking. “I’ll get it though.” It was something about splitting his focus that was causing him problems, but he was sure that if he kept practicing he would get the hang of it. He could talk to Kanan about it, though he was reasonably sure Kanan would probe for more information. And he might not be able to help much anyway, Kanan had said himself, this was Ezra’s talent. Kanan’s lay elsewhere.

What if that meant Ezra just wouldn’t have a talent for using the Force to navigate?

“You don’t have to,” Hobbie said. “I just wondered if it was possible.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and it _is_ possible. So it’s probably gonna be possible to do it with more than two. Like five.” The number of dokma entered in the races. If he could connect to all of them, even on the most basic level, reach them in that way, he would still be able to enjoy the races even if — when — he couldn’t exactly _watch_ them. Maybe. He wasn’t sure, he didn’t know how enjoyable that would be.

Hobbie shrugged. “Okay,” he said, sounding puzzled, but not interested enough to ask.

He didn’t understand. That was fine; he might work it out, he might not, it wasn’t something that Ezra wanted to explain. But the races were fun, and there was precious little to do on the base during downtime. As silly as it might be, as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and as unimportant compared to everything else, he didn’t want to lose them.

“So, what if you connect to one different dokma?” Hobbie asked. “Is it exactly the same as any other, or are there differences between them?”

Ezra frowned, selected a new dokma and reached out, broke the connection and repeated with another. “What kind of differences?” he asked, detecting nothing.

Hobbie shrugged. “I dunno, you’re the expert. Just, you know, experiment with it. If you can’t _make_ them move, see if there’s any way to tell which one’s more likely to want to move. It maybe won’t be as exact, but who wants to win every time anyway? It’s a good way to get banned.”

“Yeah.” Ezra frowned. That was the last thing he wanted. Honestly, he probably wasn’t even going to use this if he _could_ work it out. Well, maybe once or twice. Or three or four times. But very well spread out, over months, or even years. Only when there was something very important at stake.

“Don’t tell anybody, either,” Hobbie said. “The last thing we want is for someone to mention it to someone else and before we know about it, the whole base knows before you’ve even tried it out.”

Ezra frowned. “Do I look like an idiot?”

“Well, now that you mention it…”

“Shut up, I’m trying to concentrate.”

Hobbie smirked. “You shouldn’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to,” he told him, but then fell into silence, watching as Ezra began to work.

Ezra closed his eyes to increase his concentration. It was something that he had always done without really thinking about it when working with the Force in this way, and he deliberately didn’t think about it now. Instead, he reached outward with the Force, connecting to a different nearby dokma. He pushed carefully into what passed for its consciousness and lingered there, becoming accustomed to what he could sense from it, hoping to find some way to differentiate it from the last one.

There were differences, but they were subtle, a lesser version of the way that people each had their own signature in the Force; if he concentrated enough, he could become aware of slight differences between them, like patterns of ripples changing just slightly on the surface of a lake. It wasn’t going to tell him which ones felt like moving down a racetrack. It _might_ , in time, allow him to differentiate one dokma from another; help him know if he had seen a particular one before, but he didn’t need that, that wouldn’t be useful to him at all.

He heard Hobbie sink to the ground next to him and sigh deeply. Curious, Ezra dropped his connection to the dokma completely and turned his attention to his friend, feeling his signature in the Force, trying to learn it so that he would be able to recognize it without sight. He would need that, he would need to do that for everybody. Voices too. And he would need to recognize them, actually know who was who rather than just get an impression of familiarity before turning to see the face.

Because he wouldn’t be able to see…

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees head and rested his head in his hands. He opened his eyes and felt himself relax just slightly. That wasn’t yet. He had time. He was going to be able to learn everything that he needed, by the time he couldn’t… by that time he wouldn’t need… he shook his head as though he could shake the thought out, because no matter how ready he was, it wasn’t going to matter. When the time came it wasn’t going to be enough.

“You okay? What's happening?” Hobbie asked.

Ezra flinched; he had almost forgotten. Not that Hobbie was there exactly, but that he was watching him, that there might be a visible sign that something was wrong.

“Did you find something?” Hobbie continued. He thought it was about the dokma. He could see that something was going on, but he had no way to follow the thoughts running through Ezra’s mind, and assumed he was still focused on the dokma.

Ezra lifted his head from his hands and looked at him before he answered. “Not yet,” he said. He glanced around. It was early evening, and the sun was still up, though hanging a little heavy over the horizon. An uneasy feeling stirred in his stomach; they were away from the base lights, they had had to be in order to be hidden. He didn’t want a repeat of the last time he had tried this, finding himself stranded in the dark, picking his way through a field of invisible, moving obstacles. And with _Hobbie_ there instead of Kanan. With anybody at all there.

His fingers closed around the flashlight hanging from his belt and he squeezed it gently for reassurance. “Hey, Hobbie? If it starts to get dark, tell me, okay? I’ve been known to get distracted doing stuff like that and forget what’s going on around me. I don’t want to be… I need to get back before dark…” he didn’t want to tell Hobbie about that night, he didn’t want to hint that it might have happened. “I need to… do something,” he tried.

It wasn’t a good excuse, it didn’t really make any sense, but Hobbie appeared to accept it. That taken care of, he tried again to connect to the dokma. He couldn’t help the feeling that this was going to be a fruitless task, but at least it was something. Something that he could do, something to concentrate on, something to think about other than the one thing that he didn’t want to think about.

He reached back out to the creature, reconnecting, feeling its familiar yet completely alien mind. There was no quick way to do this, there was nothing he could do but sit there with it, become familiar with it, and then do it again, and again, and eventually something might begin to make sense, some difference, something that would tell them what they needed to know.

“What do we say if anyone comes over and asks what we’re doing?” Hobbie asked.

Ezra didn’t bother to open his eyes, keeping all of his attention focused on the creature; he shrugged. “Just change the subject,” he said.

It was something he was good at. The only problem was that he usually changed the subject to the dokma. Now, he was going to have to come up with something else.


	3. Chapter 3

The races were as crowded as ever. The obstacle courses had apparently become less interesting, since the dokma had started to be more docile and less inclined to move again; getting them to move down the racetrack was difficult enough, running an entire obstacle course was impossible, and Ezra had overheard the grumbles to prove it.

“I noticed something about the dokma,” Ezra said to Hobbie. He kept his voice to a low whisper, checking around him for other prying ears.

“Wait, not here.” Hobbie thrust his hands into his pockets and glanced around shiftily in a way that made him look exactly like somebody up to no good. Ezra was just about to tell him so, when Hobbie grabbed his arm and pulled him unexpectedly to one side, away from the crowds.

Caught off-balance, Ezra stumbled and only just managed to keep himself from falling to the ground. “Hey!” he whispered sharply. He kept his voice low, because Hobbie was obviously trying to be discreet, but tried to convey his irritation in a glare. He pulled his sleeve free of Hobbie’s grip and followed him, still glaring, as they moved to the outskirts of the crowd.

The further from the track they got, the more the lights dimmed. Ezra stopped when he could barely see Hobbie. More importantly, he could barely see the ground, and any dokma that may be lurking there. He touched his flashlight, but didn’t unhook it from his belt, or switch it on. People would notice something like that, and he didn’t want to be noticed.

“That’s probably far enough,” he said in a voice that begged not to be challenged.

Hobbie hesitated. He glanced around them, then appeared to decide that Ezra was right. “Okay. What did you notice?” he asked. There was curiosity and eagerness in his voice. Ezra puffed out a sigh. Hobbie was going to be disappointed.

He rubbed at his arm, where he could still feel the unexpected grip of Hobbie’s fingers, erasing the sensation. “Nothing that exciting,” he said.

“Oh. Okay.” Hobbie shrugged. Or, Ezra thought he shrugged, it was difficult to tell in the thickening darkness. He couldn’t have dragged him in the other direction; the way that Ezra would be leaving when he went back to the Ghost at the end of the night? It was far better lit. It was also the main path to and from the racetrack, and so had a lot more traffic, so he supposed that this had been a more sensible choice for a secret conversation.

“Most of the dokma have gone now,” Ezra said. There were definitely fewer creatures around the base. It was becoming easier to walk about without having to dodge them.

Hobbie laughed. “Yeah, I noticed. And I heard two of the guys running the obstacle courses complaining about it the other day. The dokma just refuse to do them now.”

“Yeah, well a lot of them have finally given in to the urge to go wherever it was they were supposed to be going,” Ezra explained. “Far as I can tell, most of the ones still here are a few stragglers that only just arrived and are doing what the last batch did and staying for a while before they move on, but there’s a few that don’t seem to want to go.”

Hobbie folded his arms, even more interested now. “What do you mean?”

It wasn’t easy to explain. “Before, they all had — well, maybe not _all_ , because I guess these guys were here then too, there just weren’t enough of them for me to have randomly chosen one — but all the ones I connected to had this urge to be somewhere; wherever it is they’re disappearing to now, I guess. Some of the ones left behind just don’t. I don't know if they’re the same ones that have been here all along, or new ones that just decided to stay for whatever reason, but they’re comfortable here, they don’t want to go.”

“Well, that’s good,” Hobbie said with a laugh. “If they all left, we’d have nothing to do in our downtime.”

He hadn’t actually thought of that. Despite every single dokma he had made a connection to over the past few days wanting to be someplace else, it had never even occurred to Ezra that they could all leave. “Yeah,” he said, “that _is_ good.”

It also made them different. Unique. It was interesting.

“But can you use that for anything?” Hobbie asked him.

He shrugged. “I mean, the ones that want to leave are definitely more likely to move around,” he said. “They’re restless. Even if they’re not ready to leave the safe zone, they know they shouldn’t be here; it’s like pacing, only not.”

“Sounds promising,” Hobbie said.

It did, too. Ezra glanced back at the track, then to Hobbie again, grinning. “Wanna try it out?" he asked.

* * *

As they neared the track again, and the world around him came back into a sharper focus, Ezra spotted Wedge standing with a small group at the far side of the track. The other pilot made eye contact and raised a hand quickly in greeting before returning to the conversation he was having with his friends.

The previous race had finished while they had been distracted, and the audience had dispersed slightly while they waited for the next one.

Ezra considered his options. On the one hand, it would be better to do this without an audience, especially the part where he chose a dokma and communicated to Hobbie which one he should go for. One the other, if they avoided Wedge, Wedge would probably want to know why. Ezra sighed. At least there was an opportunity for some payback. He grabbed Hobbie’s arm and gave it a hard tug, harder than he needed too. Hobbie’s eyes widened in panic and he grabbed pointlessly at the air in an attempt to stop himself falling. Ezra grinned. He probably hadn’t made his point, but it had been fun.

“Who won?” he asked as he approached the small group of three pilots.

Wedge glanced at his two friends quickly before answering. He folded his arms and swallowed. “Green,” he said.

Ezra nodded. Wedge was looking at him nervously. It wasn’t the embarrassed, apprehensive, not-sure-what-to-say way that some people had been around him since they had found out; this was something different. It took Ezra a moment before he worked out what it was. His last conversation with Wedge hadn’t ended so well. In fact, it had ended with Ezra taking out all of his frustrations caused by other people’s comments on a completely innocent Wedge, and then storming off, only to realise a few minutes later that Wedge hadn’t even _known_ anything about Ezra’s eyes.

The whole thing was pretty mortifying. Even if he did have a pretty good excuse.

“Uh, sorry,” he said. “For the other day, I mean. I’d just had people saying stupid stuff asking me dumb questions all day, and I thought you were doing the same, and… yeah. I forgot you’d only just gotten back to base.”

Wedge shrugged. “It’s okay. I guess next time I ask someone how they are, I’ll ask around first and make sure I know what the answer’s gonna be.”

Hobbie looked from one of them to the other. “What?” he asked.

“Uh…” Wedge hesitated.

“Basically, I’m an idiot,” Ezra told him. He shook his head. “Don’t ask.”

Hobbie laughed. “Well, I knew that already,” he said. “But you can pretty much guarantee I _am_ going to be asking.”

He would, too. Ezra sighed. Well, at least he was honest about it.

Hobbie leaned over the side of the track and examined the dokma carefully, as though he would be able to tell just by looking at them which one might win. They weren’t moved between races, they were left in the racetrack to continue milling around until the next race began and they were moved back to their starting positions. The previous race had just finished, and the race organizers were occupied with distributing winnings.

“So, Ezra,” Hobbie said, sounding _too_ casual, if such a thing were possible, “which one do you think?”

Ezra joined him in peering over the low ‘wall’ that surrounded the track, preventing the dokma from escaping. The one wearing the green paint, the previous winner, was still sitting on the finish line, eye stalks moving left and right, but not trying to go anywhere anymore. The others were behaving in much the same way, some wandering across the track, one appearing to be trying to climb out, and one -- the one painted red -- might have fallen asleep.

Ezra reached out to each of them in turn, working quickly so as not to attract notice or suspicion. He tried green first. As he had suspected, as made sense for his theory, its mind still harbored a need to be elsewhere. He glanced back at Hobbie, but Wedge had wandered over and the two of them were talking, it would have been impossible to drag Hobbie away without it being suspicious. It occurred to him that going over to greet the others had been a bad idea, but then, it would have looked odd if they hadn’t. And he had been able to give an apology that he had forgotten was overdue.

He selected another dokma, and then another, and another. Each one of them was the same, each one of them had that desire to leave. There was no desperation to be free, he was relieved to find that they didn’t appear bothered or distressed by the racetrack keeping them on the base. That was good. He wasn’t sure that he’d be able to enjoy the races any more if they were.

The final dokma, the one wearing red paint, was different. It was one of those that didn’t need to leave. It was demonstrating that lack of motivation by attempting to climb the sheer wall that surrounded the track. Ezra sighed. This wasn’t going to help them with anything.

“Well?” Hobbie asked approaching him again, from behind.

Ezra glanced at the group, they were too close by for him to say much. “No way to predict it,” he said, not whispering, but keeping his voice as low as he could. “Not red,” he said.

Hobbie nodded. He glanced at the other dokma and frowned. “Maybe we’ll have to try this another time,” he suggested.

Ezra didn’t reply. He found himself staring at the smear of red paint on the dokma’s shell and feeling like an idiot. Even if he could work out a way to predict which dokma might win, they differentiated between the creatures by _color_. How would he be able to explain which dokma he wanted to back when he didn’t know which one wore which color? He closed his eyes, just for a moment, imagining that scenario as frustration built up inside him.

He took a deep breath and tried to release the useless emotion. His eyes were ruining _everything_ , and it had barely even _started_ to get bad yet.

“Funny,” Hobbie said. “Red looks like the most mobile of them all right now. I’d probably have gone for him, if you hadn’t said that.”

“Maybe you should, then,” Ezra said. “It’s not like this is ever going to come to anything anyway.”

Hobbie frowned, looking at him with genuine concern. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Ezra shook his head. “Nothing. I think I might just…”

“No don’t.”

Hobbie stopped him with a hand on his arm, just as Ezra moved to leave. He went to shake his hand free, but Hobbie held on tighter, shaking his head. “Stick around,” he said. “Please. Wedge just went to get drinks, and I want you to see if this pans out.”

Ezra hesitated.

“Trust me,” Hobbie told him. “Whatever it is that you just thought of, it’ll feel better after a drink. Things always do.”

Apparently, he hesitated a moment too long, because Hobbie appeared to take it for agreement and grinned. Ezra sighed. “What kind of a drink?” he asked.

“There’s not a lot of choice,” Hobbie told him. “But I heard a rumor they started bringing out the new batch from the still now, so it might not be so bad. So, bets. Anyone but red you said, so how about I go for yellow, you take blue? That way we have a 50/50 chance of winning.”

Ezra glanced back at the racetrack and shrugged. Kanan bet on the races sometimes. True, he wasn’t trying to play the system like Ezra was — that he knew of, anyway — but he still took part. Maybe Kanan knew something that he hadn’t shared because he had been too busy with more important things. Ezra made a mental note to ask him. As long, as he could think of a way to do it without giving anything away, that was.

Which, as it was Kanan, might be difficult. Better to avoid the subject of the dokma entirely for the time being, around everyone. Maybe it was a thing that he could work out on his own.

Someone thrust a cup into his hands and he glanced down at the liquid inside. It was more or less clear, unlike the yellowy hue of beer. He had tasted that from time to time on Lothal, when it was the only clean thing he could get his hands on to drink, and one time with Kanan and Zeb after a mission one night, on the proviso that he didn’t tell Hera. He couldn’t imagine the small amount of liquid helping anything, but he was willing to give it a go. He raised the cup to his lips and took an experimental sip.

The liquid burned like it was hot, even though no heat leaked through the cup and it appeared to be around the same temperature as the air. Either the taste or the smell of it, he wasn’t sure which, burned both his mouth and his nose and he gasped for air, glancing around the group in horror, checking for their reactions.

“Not bad,” Hobbie said, and licked his lips. “Any idea what they did to it to make it stop hurting on the way down?”

Ezra sniffed the drink. It was a smell that he almost recognized; it had an industrial tang to it, not something that should be going into the body.

Someone knocked a shoulder against his, and Ezra turned to see Wedge smiling sympathetically at him. “Believe me,” he said, “this is at least ten times better than the last batch. The trick is not to breathe as it goes down.” Demonstrating, he took a gulp of the drink, then grinned as though that made everything clear.

Ezra shrugged, inhaled and held his breath before doing the same. It still burned, but maybe it wasn’t so bad. The burn travelled down to to his stomach as a pleasant warmth. He had a feeling it would be better if Kanan didn’t find out about this either.


	4. Chapter 4

All things considered, Ezra was glad that Hobbie had made him stay at the races the previous night. He wasn’t sure that Hobbie had been right about the drink making things feel better, or whether it had simply been the company taking his mind off his worries, but it was safe to say that he’d had a better time than he would have if he had gone back to his room and stared at the ceiling until he fell asleep.

True, he had lost his bet, but on the positive side, at least Hobbie hadn’t won either, and it wasn’t as though either of them had bet anything important. Hobbie was going to be disappointed if he thought Ezra was ever going to offer that helmet up as a wager. It wasn’t that it was a particularly _nice_ helmet, but the fun of having it was in the fact that it annoyed Hobbie; so as long as it kept being funny, he wasn’t going to give him a chance to win it back.

It served him right for betting it in the first place.

Maybe Ezra would even get Sabine to paint it. But probably not. Not while every mention of Sabine’s art, made him wonder how long it would be before he could no longer see well enough to enjoy it. And when he couldn’t, when Sabine had taken to describing her paintings to him the same way she sometimes did for Kanan, it was going to put a barrier between them; the same one that had been placed between her and Kanan. It was obvious to anybody that could hear her how frustratingly insufficient she found the words she was using to describe the thoughts and feelings she had placed onto her canvas, but she persevered, trying and failing to describe every nuance because it was important to her. Because she couldn’t imagine a world without color, and she was desperately trying to bring it back into Kanan’s.

Ezra sighed and ran a hand over his face, as though he could wipe away the thoughts running through his head. Maybe he should paint something on the helmet himself. That might be even funnier anyway, and it would give Sabine the chance to laugh at his terrible efforts. She probably wouldn’t do that, of course, no matter how bad it was. He might have managed to heal some of the awkwardness between them, but he could still sense her walking on eggshells.

Maybe he could make it deliberately bad, bad enough that she couldn’t help but laugh; just a crude doodle and a bit of graffiti, but it would still be an Ezra Bridger original, a one of a kind.

After all, it wasn’t like he was going to have a lot of time to make more…

He took a deep breath and puffed out a sigh, then shifted his position slightly to get more comfortable on the hard dry ground. He was sitting in what had quickly become his and Hobbie’s dokma investigating spot, well hidden from the rest of the base. It was a safe spot to let his guard down. He slumped forward a little, his lower back still resting against the side of the storage crate, and hugged his knees tightly as he stared out over the expanse of desert beyond the perimeter markers. It was warm there, warmer than in the rest of the base; he was in the direct sunlight, and the heat of it soaked not only into his skin and clothing, but into the ground and the storage crate that shielded him from view.

Absentmindedly, he rubbed at the spot on the back of his shoulder where something had hit him earlier that day. Whatever it had been -- he thought maybe a small rock -- had come at him from behind, and stung as it made impact, but by the time he had spun around to see the culprit, there had been nobody around.

Now that he thought about it, it wasn’t the first time that had happened. A few days earlier, something had caught him on the shin; he hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, assuming it was a stray stone kicked up by somebody accidentally. This second incident made him wonder...

Great, so on top of everything else, he was becoming paranoid. That had to stop right now. He sighed again, and made a conscious effort to push the thoughts from his mind.

One of the dokma ambled past, its shell passing only inches from the tips of his toes. Out here on the perimeter it was quiet enough that he could hear the scratching, shuffling sound of its feet on the dusty ground. As it passed, its eyes turned on their stalks, peering in his direction as though examining him. If he hadn’t known about the expanse of nothing that was going on inside its head, he might have been able to convince himself that it was interested in him, wondering what he was doing there. It wasn’t. When he reached out and connected to the creature, he found nothing more than he had every time with every one of them. The only time he had ever experienced anything different was the fear he had felt before he had freed the two trapped creatures in the control panel.

He glared at the dokma accusingly, as though it was solely responsible for its species’ stupidity. Well, maybe it was for the best that they were too stupid for him to manipulate. The idea of finally working out how to predict which one was going to win a race, or how to make one want to get up and move, only to find himself unable to use it because he had to bet on a color and he didn’t know which was which… it was making him frustrated just thinking about it.

He could use Hobbie for that, he supposed. They were working together anyway, so it would be easier to explain which dokma he meant to him. Or, maybe not easier, but Hobbie at least would know why he was bothering to try to describe the exact location of a specific creature instead of just randomly choosing a color like everybody else. He might be able to point at the right one, it just depended how close together the creatures were standing.

He could pick one, somehow, Hobbie could tell him which color it was, and he could pretend he was just selecting something at random when he went to place his bet.

He was overthinking it. He didn’t even have a way of making a dokma win yet, he needed to do that first, or the rest was pointless.

He leaned back again, allowing his head to bump against the side of the crate with a dull thud. Planning out how he was going to do every little thing, and the help he was going to need to do them, was exhausting. It left him physically and mentally drained, barely able to summon the energy to do anything else; and what was worse was that he found himself doing it _all the time_. It was bad enough thinking about how he was going to do the big things, but when he thought about how vision loss was going to seep into every aspect of his life, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to scream in frustration or curl up in a ball on the ground. Instead, he took a deep breath, and tried to let go of the feeling; tried to release it into the Force.

He ran his fingers through his hair, feeling the new cut that still, after all those months, surprised him from time to time when he touched it, or caught a glimpse of his reflection.

That was another thing he wouldn’t be able to do one day, and it wasn’t like he spent hours staring at himself, but it would still be important to know that he looked okay; even if he couldn’t see. Maybe even _especially_ if he couldn’t see, because if he looked a mess now, people would assume it was because he was lazy or didn’t care, and that was fine. If he couldn’t see and he looked a mess, it might be because he didn’t know, and that wasn’t okay. People feeling sorry for him, or thinking they needed to help him, _wasn’t_ okay.

Especially if he really did need their help.

He needed to know when his hair needed cutting back again, and how to make sure he looked presentable before he went out; that hadn’t dropped food on his clothes and not noticed, or brushed some engine oil.

One problem was the messy patchy bits of facial hair that had started to make a ridiculous appearance over the past couple of months. It wouldn’t be difficult to check by touch whether they needed to be shaved -- in fact, he did that already, his fingertips found that task easier than his eyes -- but what he needed to know was _how_ to shave them. Well, unless he wanted people to point and laugh.

He was going to have to ask Kanan about that kind of thing, but some of it he would probably need to figure it out on his own. There was no point asking Kanan about shaving anyway, he had stopped doing it when they got back from Malachor.

Of course, for a while he had stopped doing a lot of things.

He was doing it again. Thinking about things that he didn’t want to think about. There would be time for that later. Right now, he had another task.

Ezra sucked in a deep breath and turned his attention back to the dokma. He allowed his eyes to close as he reached out to it through the Force. That particular dokma was one of those that didn’t want to leave the safety of the base and set off for wherever it was they were all going. He forged a connection to it in seconds, basking in the simplicity of its mind. He found them frustrating from the outside, but from the inside it was very easy to get lost in it.

He took another deep breath, and tried to clear his mind of all thoughts. The dokma wouldn’t respond to commands; they didn’t have the capacity to understand them. While other creatures might not know the words he was using either, they somehow understood the intention behind them. The dokma didn’t.

He pushed his way a little further into the creature’s mind, very deliberately forcing himself not to think in words. He might be able to make the connection between them stronger and more useful by adapting his way of thinking instead of expecting the dokma to change for him, which was obviously never going to happen.

That done, he sent a… not a command as such. It contained no words, or even a feeling with words and intention behind it. He simply sent relaxation, calm, peace.

He felt nothing in response, but he did notice that the dokma seemed to have stopped moving. Curious, he opened his eyes to check that he was right about that. It had stopped walking and settled down on the ground next to him, as though it meant to keep him company. It had no such intention as far as he could tell, it had no intentions at all. It had simply stopped moving for now.

Of course the question was, had it stopped because of him, or had it just decided that that looked like a nice place to sit? The dokma weren’t exactly the most energetic of creatures. Sitting around seemed to be their favorite activity. Particularly in the middle of a race.

He broke his connection to it and watched, curious to see what it would do. Nothing happened; the dokma didn’t get up and continue with its journey now that he was no longer asking it to relax. He frowned, a little disappointed. Still, that didn’t mean he hadn’t been the one that made it stop. Maybe he had caused it, but once it stopped it didn’t want to get up again.

He glanced around him, searching for another one. He needed to try it again and see what happened. Until he could repeat it, it didn’t mean anything. Once he was sure, he could show Hobbie, and maybe then, they could try…

A shadow passed over him. He turned instinctively, to see Kanan standing over him. He was wearing his mask, but angling his face downward as though observing Ezra. The painted eye-like design didn’t quite give that effect, but it was better now than it had been when the mask had been blank. Ezra wondered whether that emptiness had bothered Sabine as much as it had him. Maybe that was why she had done it.

Of course, with Sabine around, any available surface was going to get painted sooner or later, it was simply a fact of who she was.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” Kanan said.

Ezra scowled, immediately on the defensive. “I wasn’t hiding,” he said, affronted by the accusation. He really _hadn’t_ been hiding; not this time.

“You were supposed to meet me for training a half hour ago, and I find you sitting on the floor behind a storage crate,” Kanan told him in a perfectly reasonable tone. “What would you call it?”

“I _wasn’t_ hiding,” Ezra insisted. He thought back, trying to remember when they had arranged training, and what kind of training it had been supposed to be.

Kanan sighed; he stepped to the side and sat down next to Ezra, with his legs crossed and his back straight against the side of the storage crate. Ezra watched him, puzzled.

“So, what _were_ you doing?” he asked, not in a way that implied that he didn’t believe Ezra, he simply sounded curious.

Ezra glanced at the dokma, still sitting near his foot, as though its presence might give the game away, which of course it wouldn’t. “Nothing,” he said.

Kanan nodded as though that was exactly the answer he had been expecting and fell into silence for a moment. They sat side by side, backs against the crate that shielded them from the view of the rest of the base, Ezra staring out over the desert, Kanan… not.

“How are you doing?” Kanan asked after a few moments, breaking the silence. “I’ve barely seen you for a few days. Since the other night, with the dokma.”

Ezra felt himself tense at the thought of that night. The mere mention of it pulled him back to the moment when he had realized that he had to get home through a field of obstacles and he couldn’t see. He actually couldn’t see, there had been no blindfold that he could remove if it got to be too much, his eyes had been wide open, and he could see _nothing_. He took a deep breath and banished the memory.

He stared hard over the desert, taking in every detail that he could make out. “I’m fine,” he said.

Kanan nodded. “Okay, but if you’re ever not fine and you want to talk about it, come and find me, okay?”

Ezra didn’t answer. Clearly, Kanan had picked up on some of what was going through his mind. If not the specific thoughts themselves — he couldn’t do that, Ezra had asked him once — then definitely the emotions and the general reasons behind them. Ezra didn’t block him, not this time; it was too late for that. Sometimes it felt as though Kanan saw a lot more since Malachor. Not with his eyes, of course, but in other ways.

“How’d you find me out here, anyway?” Ezra asked.

Kanan shrugged. “You’ve been out here a lot recently, it was a safe bet. You’re easier for me to find than most people anyway, especially while you’re using the Force.”

Ezra felt himself frown. He hadn’t thought of that, that Kanan might have noticed what he was doing. He shifted uneasily, not sure whether it would be better to say something to change to subject, or remain silent. Kanan might only know that he had been using the Force, not what he was doing with it.

“You’ve been working with the dokma a lot recently, haven’t you?” Kanan continued. “Have you learned anything else about them?”

Or, Kanan might know exactly what he was doing. That wasn’t good. How many of the times that Ezra had connected to the dokma had he noticed? What about the night before, at the races? Did he know _why_?

Ezra shook his head quickly from side to side, knowing that the action would probably not be noticed, but unable to stop himself. “No, I haven’t learned anything, I don’t know anything else about why they were here or where they’ve gone.” And hopefully that was still all that Kanan thought he was doing.

“Well, there seems to be a lot less of them around now, anyway,” Kanan said, “so whatever it was that was happening, it looks like it’s over.”

Ezra frowned. He had to end this conversation as soon as possible. It wasn’t like Kanan _seemed_ to know what he was really doing with the dokma, but every moment they kept talking about them was another moment where he might work it out. If he hadn’t already. Ezra stretched out like he was about to get to his feet. “Hey, so you said training?”

Kanan gave a small, knowing smile, then shook his head. “Maybe we’ll leave it for another time,” he said. “I think it’s time we talked about some things, don’t you?”

Ezra glanced around him quickly; an automatic response, searching for an excuse, a reason to leave. Of course, he found nothing. He didn’t even see another dokma, the swarm really was almost over. “I said I’m okay,” he said.

“I know you did. I don’t believe you, but that’s not what I meant.”

Ezra tensed, ready to argue if he needed to.

“What I meant was that we should talk about what you’re doing out here,” Kanan told him quickly, before Ezra could say anything else.

The dokma sitting by his foot stood up slowly. It rocked from side to side, flexed its eye stalks a little and then set off again, heading around the edge of the crate and toward the center of the base. Ezra watched it go, suddenly filled with the certainty that Kanan knew everything. “I told you, I’m not doing anything,” he said. “You were right the first time; I’m hiding. Well, I was _trying_ to. It turns out I’m not as good at it as I thought.”

Kanan didn’t react; he gave no sign that he believed the lie, or that he didn’t. Tentatively, Ezra reached out with the Force, probing Kanan, trying to get a read on him. He couldn’t work out whether or not he had been believed. It wasn’t _exactly_ a lie, anyway. He hadn’t been hiding from Kanan, or from anybody in particular, but it would be possible to argue that he had been hiding from base life in general, and from the fact that he didn’t really feel a part of it any more. Even though he wouldn’t have been on a mission now, the fact that he _couldn’t_ go on one bothered him, and somehow made it difficult to actually do anything else. In fact, he had no idea what he would have been doing right now, if he hadn’t been sitting behind a crate with a dokma for company.

He wasn’t going to make that argument. Not out loud.

What he did find in Kanan’s mind was sadness, concern, pride, and a hint of amusement. It was an odd combination. Ezra frowned at it, confused.

“I just want to make sure you’re being careful,” Kanan told him. “You don’t want to get in any trouble over this. I know the dokma races aren’t exactly some Hutt-run Outer Rim casino; you’re not putting yourself in genuine danger, but if you’re caught doing anything you shouldn’t, you’re not going to be welcome back. You know yourself how quickly rumors and information spread around the base, if anybody notices something’s odd…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ezra interrupted, speaking over him before he could finish the thought. He turned and looked in the other direction, as though that would make any difference to Kanan. As he did, the dokma disappeared around the other side of the crate, leaving them completely alone.

“I’m not saying stop,” Kanan continued after a short pause. “I’m just saying don’t get caught.”

Ezra folded his arms and shifted uncomfortably, not sure now to proceed. He could continue to deny all knowledge, but it was obvious that Kanan knew, or at least had a very good idea, exactly what he and Hobbie were up to. “You can stop worrying,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Kanan told him. “Keep going though; it’s good practice. Just make sure you’re careful about it, Hobbie too. And remember, I like the races; if people realize the Force could be used like that, they’re going to assume I’m guilty too.”

“How do you…?” Ezra asked, then stopped, wincing. The question had escaped before he had the chance to stop it.

Kanan turned his head to face Ezra. “How do I what?” he asked. What Ezra could see of his face beneath the mask appeared to be frowning.

Ezra felt heat rush to his face and he looked away again. “The races,” he said, dragging the words out slowly. It would have been so much easier to tell him it didn’t matter and change the subject, but he really did want to know. “You said you like them. How do you even…” No. Too difficult. He stopped and shook his head. “Forget it. Sorry,” he muttered.

“No,” Kanan said. “It’s okay. It’s a good question.” He leaned back a little harder against the metal side of the storage crate, then reached up and removed the mask that covered the upper half of his face. Ezra felt himself relax slightly at that. The scar didn’t bother him any more. It had once; the reminder of everything that had happened, of his own failure, of the mistake that he had made and that Kanan had to live with. Now it had just become another feature of Kanan’s face. The mask did bother him. The idea of covering eyes, even eyes that couldn’t see, provoked a completely illogical sense of claustrophobia, even just seeing it on another person.

Would he have do that? Was there some reason for it, beyond hiding the injury? Ezra hoped not. It was something they might have to discuss one day. But not today.

“I like the atmosphere,” Kanan said, interrupting his thoughts before he could accidentally voice them too. “I enjoy being with people without it being about giving orders or planning missions. I like to relax. You’re not the only person around here that has friends, you know.”

Ezra rolled his eyes. “I know that,” he said.

“But you’re asking about watching the race, and placing bets,” Kanan continued. “I don’t do it often, but it’s not because I can’t. It’s not like there’s any kind of skill involved, and I don’t think being able to see the dokma would make it any easier to guess which one might wander down the track in the right direction. I just pick a color. Usually green, but not always.”

He sighed, and placed the mask in his lap but continued to touch it, running his hands around the edge, sliding over the surface, tracing the slightly raised, or different textured, painted jaig eyes with the tips of his fingers.

“I can’t ‘watch’ the race,” he added. “But I can hear the reactions of the people that can, I can sense their emotions if I want to, and I can sense the locations of the dokma on the track. I don’t know which one is which, but if one wins someone will tell me which one it was.”

“Unless they’re lying,” Ezra said quietly.

Kanan smiled. “They’re not lying,” he said. “I know when people are lying, and nobody tried it yet.” He paused. “Some people probably will try to take advantage, but not these people. And not over a couple of meilooruns, or some good-quality hair conditioner.”

Ezra quirked an eyebrow. “Hair conditioner?”

“The _point_ is, I’m not really missing out. From what I understand, most of the time there isn’t a lot to see there anyway. Five dokma standing around or walking the wrong way down a racetrack. Everybody is there for the company and the experience, not really to watch the race itself.”

That didn’t help. It felt like maybe it should, but it didn’t. Especially because the whole point of the races was to watch the races. Kanan was right, the dokma didn’t actually do anything interesting, and someone could easily tell him which one had crossed the finish line, but it wasn’t the same. If he was going to do that, why bother going at all, why not pick a random color and get someone to message him if he won?

“Yeah,” he said, sounding much more glum than he had intended. “I guess you’re right.”

Kanan frowned. He reached over and clasped Ezra briefly on the shoulder. “Or maybe you’ll figure something else out. Something using this thing you’re working on. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got so far.”

“Uh…” Ezra hesitated, caught between denying that he was doing anything, and finding out whether Kanan had any insight that he might be able to share. He chose a third option; change the subject. Unfortunately, talking about the dokma had suddenly become as awkward as talking about his eyes. “Hey, did you know that drink they make in the still is easier to drink if you don’t breathe?” he tried.

Kanan’s lips quirked in a half-smile. “I did,” he said. “The real question is, why do _you_ know that?”

“Just something I heard,” Ezra told him with a grin. “I thought you might find it useful is all.”

“I think that will be one of those things that we don’t mention to Hera.” Kanan climbed to his feet. “We’ll skip training for today, keep meditating with the dokma. I know it’s not why you’re doing it, but I still think you’re going to find it helpful.”

He raised the mask back to his face as he walked away. Ezra watched him go, confused and relieved by the conversation. He was still going to deny everything if Kanan brought it up again; it was safer that way. He shuffled to the edge of the crate and glanced around it, resuming his search for a second dokma to experiment with.


	5. Chapter 5

Ezra had expected a bit more enthusiasm from Hobbie on his revelation. His friend was standing, arms folded, leaning against the side of the storage crate that had become their unofficial base of operations over the past few days. He was frowning, not exactly in disbelief, but he was obviously still waiting to be convinced.

“It stopped,” Ezra said, needlessly, pointing at the dokma by Hobbie’s feet. It was the second time he had demonstrated the ability, and Hobbie still looked doubtful.

Hobbie looked down. The dokma had settled next to the storage crate, pulled its feet inside its shell, and looked like it had no intention of going anywhere else for some time. “Yeah,” Hobbie said. “But dokma stop walking around all the time. Are you _sure_ it’s because of you? There’s one over there doing the exact same thing.” He pointed into the distance.

Ezra looked, raising a hand to shield his eyes, partly to block out the glare of the sun, partly to disguise the fact that he was squinting. He couldn’t see any dokma in that direction. He glanced sideways at Hobbie, trying to decide whether there was really a dokma there, or whether he was testing him. Most likely he just couldn’t see it, Hobbie wouldn’t do that. He didn’t _think_ Hobbie would do that.

“Yeah, I know,” he lied. “I thought of that, actually, when I realized I could do it. That’s why I tried it so many times. It works, trust me.” He spied another dokma approaching them from the crate, and pointed to it. “Ready?”

“Sure.” Hobbie watched the creature as Ezra closed his eyes and reached out to it, sending the wordless wave of intent.

Through his connection to it, Ezra could sense the creature slow, then finally stop. He opened an eye to confirm that he was right, then turned a triumphant grin in Hobbie’s direction.

“Okay,” Hobbie said, “Three out of three, that’s pretty convincing. Congratulations, you have the power to bore dokma into a stupor!” He smirked.

“Hey!”

“Sorry.” He shrugged. “Well, not really.” He glanced down at the three dokma sitting around them. As he did, the second one that Ezra had stopped got to its feet and continued on its way to wherever it was going. “So, do you want to try it out for real tonight?”

Ezra considered it. On the one hand, he was curious as to whether he would be able to actually influence the outcome of the race; on the other, whether it worked or not, this technique wasn’t going to be any good in the long run. He shook his head. “No, not yet.”

The first dokma got back to its feet and continued on its way. “Why not?” Hobbie asked, watching it go.

“Because I’m supposed to be figuring out how to make one dokma win, not make four others lose.”

Hobbie frowned. “If it works, does it matter how you do it?” he said.

It did. It mattered a lot. But it wasn’t something that he was going to be able to explain to Hobbie. He sat down on the ground, maintaining a tentative connection to the third dokma. It was still happily sitting there, basking in the sunlight. As soon as he released it, it would be free to do what it wanted again, and if he connected to another one, he would have to release that one first because he could only connect to one dokma at a time.

Until now, his main worry -- outside of being caught and banned from the races -- had been the idea that the whole thing would fall apart when he could no longer tell which color of paint had been daubed onto the shell of whatever dokma he had chosen. Now, Hobbie was expecting him to track five constantly moving creatures, moving his control from one to another, and to know which of the five not to touch.

He could do it. Now. Without sight, without the colors as a visual reference, it would be impossible.

Of course, Hobbie didn’t know that. He couldn’t possibly know that. He probably hadn’t even considered the future in that way. Ezra wished he still had that luxury. Suddenly, whichever way he turned, he saw it looming over him, and that wasn’t going to stop. Not until...

“ _Does_ it matter?” Hobbie said again, sounding less sure of himself now.

Ezra made an effort to push aside the thoughts running through his head. He shrugged slowly, buying himself a little time to remember what they had been talking about. Hobbie’s expression was one of confusion mingled with the beginnings of concern. Ezra couldn’t tell him the truth. He didn’t even know how to put that into words that would make sense to someone that didn’t use the Force, or that hadn’t spent any length of time thinking about what losing your sight would actually mean. Anyway, he didn’t want to explain. He could try to imply what he wanted to say, and leave Hobbie to work it out. But no, he didn’t even really want to do that, because if Hobbie didn’t know, then Ezra could continue to pretend nothing was wrong. 

“It’s just got to be easier to control one dokma than four,” he said. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth. “Anyway, don’t you think it’d look a bit weird if all the dokma but one just kept sitting down for a rest in the middle of the race?”

“No, not really,” Hobbie told him. “I think it’d look indistinguishable from any other race. In fact, it’s probably going to look stranger if one of them actually races and doesn’t sit down in the middle, than if four of them take a few more rests.”

Ezra turned to look at him. Hobbie was watching him warily, obviously not knowing what he was thinking, but very much aware that something was wrong. “What is it really?” he asked

Ezra shook his head. “I don’t know. It’d just be easier to do it the other way.”

“Not if the other way doesn’t work,” Hobbie supplied, correctly.

“It will work. As soon as I’ve figured it out. And anyway, the one I’m going to try to control isn’t just going to get up and run, it doesn’t work that way. I’m thinking if I can make them want to sit down, there’s got to be a way to make them want to move. They’re too stupid to understand where I want them to move to anyway.”

“So it might move in completely the wrong direction?”

Ezra shrugged and grinned. “Maybe, yeah, unless I figure out how to make them a lot smarter. But then hopefully it’ll get to the other side, turn around and go back again. Anyway, the races wouldn’t be fun if there wasn’t some chance of losing.”

Hobbie shook his head and grinned back at him. “Speak for yourself. I want to win.”

“We will,” Ezra promised him. “Okay, I’m going to work on making this one want to move around.” He indicated the third dokma, the one still sitting on the ground, with a wave of his hand, and glanced up to gauge the position of the sun. He had an hour at least before it started to set. “Can you keep watch again?”

Hobbie sank to the ground next to him, settling in for a long stretch. “You me to tell you if it gets dark again?”

Ezra hesitated. Last time they had done this, he had given an excuse for needing to be warned about the encroaching nighttime. It hadn’t been a good excuse, but at least it had been some way to justify it. Obviously it hadn’t fooled him. He glanced quickly at Hobbie, and then away again. “Yeah, if you want,” he said, then closed his eyes and concentrated on the dokma before Hobbie had a chance to react. “But mostly, keep an eye on the dokma, tell me if it does anything interesting.”

* * *

It was a lot more difficult to get the dokma to move than it was to make them stop. That revelation hadn’t been unexpected. The vast majority of the dokma remaining around the base now were the ones that simply didn’t have the drive to go anywhere, and that meant that staying where they were was, in a way, their default setting. Finally, though, Ezra felt like he might be getting somewhere.

Ezra furrowed his brow in concentration and pushed a command onto the creature. “Anything?” he asked Hobbie, who was still sitting nearby.

“Not sure, try it again?” Hobbie said. Ezra sighed and tried again. The dokma hadn’t moved, he could tell that much through his connection, and his ability to discern the position of the creature he was sharing a connection with. Without words, he pushed a feeling in the creature’s direction, something like the opposite of the feeling he had sent when he had made it stop.

“It’s wiggling its eye things around a bit,” Hobbie told him. “Maybe it’s just tired, it should probably have got up and walked away by itself by now. The others did.”

Ezra sighed, and pushed a little harder. Hobbie didn’t say anything, so presumably there was no noticeable difference. He pushed harder still, trying to keep himself calm and not give into the frustration that he could feel building up inside him. He could have tapped into it, and he could probably have used it to increase his ability, but he wouldn’t.

Instead, he took a deep breath and released the frustration as he exhaled. He broke the connection for a moment, then remade it, with more purpose this time. He remembered that need to move on that he had sensed in the swarm, that feeling that set them aside from their more complacent brethren; the restlessness, the need to be elsewhere. He replicated it within himself, and then sent it through their connection, pushing hard, like a wave rather than a gentle stream.

“It’s…” Hobbie hesitated. “It’s doing something. It’s getting up. Oh, unless it would have just gotten up anyway; maybe it finally got bored and decided to leave.”

It wasn’t that. It couldn’t be. Not at that precise moment, it would have been too much of a coincidence. Ezra opened his eyes to watch the dokma as it began to move away.

It was dark.

Not as dark as he had allowed it to get a few nights ago, when he had tried connecting with the dokma for the first time. The world around him was made of shades of gray and muted colors, unlike the blackness that night. He squinted. It made no difference, it was as though all the detail had been erased, leaving him with shapes and outlines.

He turned to Hobbie.

“What do you think?” Hobbie asked. “Was that you, or did it just get sick of having you in its head and decide to leave?”

Ezra could make out the shape of his friend, still hunched on the ground a few feet away. His datapad was face up on the ground next to him, the screen glowing brightly, but not in the right direction to allow him to see Hobbie’s face. Ezra climbed to his feet, keeping one hand on the side of the storage crate. He didn’t need to, but the solid object made him feel safe. Unease stirred in the pit of his stomach. He took a deep breath, and tried to release it in the same way that he had his frustration at the dokma.

He licked his lips, and tried to sound casual. “That was definitely me,” he said. He turned to face the direction from which he could sense the dokma’s presence, as though he were watching it go. He couldn’t locate it, the light color of its shell blended in well with the shade of the desert ground. “I’ll have to try a few more times to make sure I can do it again, but I’m sure it moved because of me.”

“Great,” Hobbie said with an audible grin. “So you have the power to bore them to sleep, _and_ to scare them away.”

Ezra shrugged. “I’d be insulted, if that wasn’t exactly what I was trying to do.” He broke his connection to the dokma, and tuned his awareness, but not his face, to his friend. “You were going to tell me when it got dark,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” Hobbie paused, “it is getting that way. I was going to mention it in a few minutes, if you hadn’t stopped on your own.”

Ezra’s awareness of him through the Force was made up of that impossible-to-describe signature that each person had, unique to them, but sometimes difficult to differentiate from others. He would learn them, eventually. For now, Hobbie’s just felt familiar, but he just wasn’t sure that he would recognize it if he didn’t already know who it was. Through it, he could feel nothing that would imply that Hobbie had noticed that anything was wrong.

Ezra shrugged, still not facing Hobbie. It wasn’t dark, Ezra could see that himself. The sun had barely begun to set, and the light level had dropped only slightly. Hobbie could obviously see well enough that it never occurred to him that it might be a problem. Probably because Ezra had never told him that it would be.

Carefully, he brushed the flashlight hanging from his belt with his fingertips, checking that it was there. It was still light. He could still see the top of the sun as it dipped into the horizon, he could still see everything, more or less, it was just the details that escaped him. The flashlight wouldn’t help with that. As tempting as it was to switch it on, all it would do right now was draw attention to him.

“Okay, I guess we should head back,” Ezra said. He tried to keep his tone light, but he could hear the tension in his voice as memories of the last time he had made this mistake flooded back to him. He swallowed hard, and stared down at the ground just before him, unblinking. It wasn’t like the last time. He could see. If he was careful, and if he was quick, he could get back to the illuminated part of the base without Hobbie even realizing that there was a problem.

It felt a little like walking through a thick mist that had settled on the ground. He could make out the ground itself, and any obstacles, just about, but with difficulty. He reminded himself with each step not to walk slowly, not to feel his way with the tips of his toes, not to look like he couldn’t see. He reached out with the Force as best he could, scanning the ground before him as he took each step. It wasn’t like the other night. The darkness wasn’t so thick and overpowering and the dokma were almost all gone. He maintained what felt like a normal pace, with Hobbie walking quietly by his side.

The fingers of his right hand ached by the time he reached the base itself, and he realized that he had been tightly gripping the flashlight that was still attached to his belt as he had walked. He forced himself to let it go and flexed his fingers, then turned to Hobbie.

“I think it’s going to work,” he said, talking about the dokma. After all, Hobbie wasn’t aware that there was anything else to talk about. “I just need to try it out a few more times to be sure, then we can try it out for real, see if it works.”

Hobbie folded his arms and nodded. “Sounds good,” he said.

He had positioned himself directly underneath one of the artificial lights of the base. They had only recently turned on, which made sense, as it wasn’t dark, but by its light, Ezra could see Hobbie easily again. He was staring at the ground, looking unhappy. Ezra frowned.

Hobbie cleared his throat. “So, I guess for future reference, this is what I should think of as dark?” he said. “To tell you, I mean.”

Ezra froze, embarrassed. “No,” he said, automatically.

Hobbie looked at him searchingly. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t know,” he said.

That was the _point_. Ezra sighed. “Fine, this is dark-ish. Yeah, this is what I mean by dark.”

Hobbie glanced around them. “It’s barely dusk,” he said. “I mean, the sun’s almost down, it’s not as light as it was, but it’s not…” he stopped, and looked at Ezra. “Okay,” he said. “Sorry.”

Ezra shrugged. “It’s fine,” he said. “I should’ve said. You’re right, it’s not dark. I can see it’s not dark, I just can’t s…” he looked away. “I just can’t see much else. Stupid, right?” He leaned against the wall of a building and folded his arms.

“No it’s not, it’s…”

“Anyway, it’s not gonna be a problem anymore.” He glanced around to ensure that nobody was within earshot and lowered his voice a little more. “Because I’m thinking the next step is to try to do… the thing… without being obvious. That means eyes open, and maybe while doing something else.”

Hobbie nodded, appearing to accept the change of subject. “Maybe after a drink or two, too,” he added.

Ezra relaxed. He grimaced theatrically at the memory of the burning liquid running down his throat. If he tried it again, maybe he’d be able to take a sip without gasping for breath. “As long as Kanan’s not there,” he said.

“We could still try it tonight,” Hobbie suggested. “Now you think you’ve managed to do…” he glanced around for prying ears, “…that thing you wanted… Why not try it out a few more times, beforehand, make sure it works, and then try it out for real?”

It was tempting. He glanced around and located a dokma some distance away, not doing much. He surreptitiously elbowed Hobbie in the side, and nodded in the direction of the creature, then took a few casual steps in that direction. Hobbie followed him. As he walked, Ezra began to concentrate on that same feeling, restlessness, a need to move. He watched the dokma as he made the connection, making a conscious effort not to close his eyes, and pushed the wave of feeling at the creature. As he watched, it flexed its eye stalks for a moment, then got to its feet and wandered away.

Ezra glanced at Hobbie and grinned triumphantly. Hobbie returned the grin. “I guess we’re going to the races then,” he said.


	6. Chapter 6

Pure luck had prevented them from running into any other members of the crew as they crept into the Ghost and made their way to Ezra’s quarters. Ezra opened the door and stepped through, followed by Hobbie, who had never been there before. He peered around the room in obvious interest.

“The place smells like Zeb,” he commented.

“Yeah.” Ezra shrugged. “You get used to it.”

Ezra opened his closet door a crack, just wide enough to reach inside with one hand through the small gap. He swept the underside of the shelf with his fingers and quickly located the ration bars that he had taped there for emergencies. He freed them from the tape and pulled them out, then closed the door, and leaned against it in a way that he hoped appeared casual. Somewhere inside that closet, the plush loth-cat lurked, ready and able to embarrass him by its presence. Somehow, he doubted that he’d be able to pass it off as Zeb’s.

He held out the ration bars to Hobbie. “How about these? They’re the good ones.”

Hobbie looked at the bars, then frowned at him disapprovingly. “Why do you have food hidden in your room? That’s a good way to attract pests, you know. Imperial regs stated no food in sleeping quarters; it’s one of the few rules that I actually agree with.”

Ezra shrugged. Clearly, Hobbie had never had to hoard food just so that he knew where his next meal was coming from. Ezra knew he didn’t need to do that anymore — the food on the base wasn’t exactly great, but there was enough of it to go around — but old habits died hard. Anyway, these were his favorite flavor. “Sometimes I like a snack in the middle of the night and I don’t want to get up,” he said. “Anyway, Zeb hides waffles, surely that’s worse.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s definitely worse,” Hobbie told him. “But way more valuable than three ration bars if we bet them. Do you know where he hides them?”

Ezra hesitated. Hobbie was right; they would definitely get more for waffles than ration bars, but it was too risky. Zeb went to the races sometimes; not often, but it would be just his luck if Zeb chose that night. Or if he decided he wanted some waffles, went to his stash, and found them missing. Or worse, if Ezra wasn’t able to make a particular dokma win, and wound up losing both the race _and_ the waffles.

He shook his head, and lied. “Nah, I’ve been searching for weeks now, I have no idea where they are. I just know they’re there somewhere.”

“That’s too bad,” Hobbie said. He reached out and took the bars from Ezra’s hand to examine them more closely. “Because the most these are going to win us is more ration bars, and I don’t know about you, but I was hoping for something a bit more exciting.”

So was Ezra, but they still had to be careful. “If we suddenly bet something big and win, people are going to notice,” he said.

“Everyone’s gotta get lucky sooner or later,” Hobbie told him. “They can’t get suspicious if it happens once. It’s if we _keep_ doing it that we need to be careful.”

“They _can_ get suspicious,” Ezra insisted. “Think about it; I’ve been going to the races for months, since before you even arrived, and I’ve been winning meilooruns and ration bars and stuff. If the first time I bet something big, I win, it’s going to look weird. Especially if I then go back to betting little things.” Which he was going to have to, because if he carried on betting big, he would have to deliberately lose the things, or win again, and seem more suspicious.

Hobbie dropped down onto Zeb’s bed. “Point,” he said.

“Okay, how about this,” Ezra suggested. “I bet my ration bars, and you bet something better. You’ve been going to the races for less time, and _you’re_ not actually doing anything to influence the race, so they can be suspicious all they want, there’s nothing to prove.” He didn’t like it even as he said it, but it made sense. Unfortunately, it also meant that he wasn’t going to get much out of the whole experiment.

“Sounds good,” Hobbie told him with a grin. “I’ll even share my winnings with you. I’m feeling generous.”

He’d better share. “So what are you going to bet?” he asked.

“Well…” Hobbie shrugged. “The problem is, I don’t have a lot that anybody might want. It’s got to be something good, something that’s going to win us a prize worth having, or there’s no point.”

“Great. So that plan’s not going to work.” Ezra took back his ration bars from Hobbie. “Back to the original one, I guess.”

Hobbie shook his head. “No, wait a minute.” He looked around the room, eyes darting from one side to the other as he took in everything on display. “You have a lot of junk, you know that, right?” he said.

Ezra looked around the small room that he shared with Zeb. He had a poster or two on the wall, his small collection of Imperial helmets, a change of clothes, his datapad. Elsewhere, not currently visible, he kept the holo of his parents, a sketch of the crew that Sabine had given him a year or so ago, and a few more ration bars that he had smuggled out of the kitchen. And, of course, the loth-cat.

It wasn’t much, but it probably _was_ more than Hobbie had; he had defected from the Empire, he hadn't had a lot of opportunity to pack a bag of his prized possessions. If the Empire even let you have prized possessions, that was. They didn’t exactly encourage individuality.

“Some of it’s Zeb’s,” he said, a little defensively.

Hobbie nodded, continuing to look around, then got to his feet, strode across the room and looked pointedly at the helmet collection. “Here’s an idea you’re going to hate,” he said with a smile.

Ezra shook his head. “Hilarious,” he said. “Yeah, that wouldn’t be unusual at all, I bet these all the time.”

“I’m not joking.” Hobbie reached for his -- formerly his -- helmet; the one that Ezra had won from him recently. “One of those other ones, sure. I know you’re not going to give them up, but you won this one at the races. That makes it a normal thing to bet, as far as I’m concerned.”

Ezra took it from him, feeling the weight of it in his hands. It wasn’t like he was particularly attached to that helmet, it didn’t really fit the collection. Still, he _wanted it_. He had won it, and it was _his_. “What if this doesn’t work?” he asked. “All I know is that I can make the dokma want to move around, I can’t control where they go.”

“Like you said earlier, where’s the fun if there’s no risk? If it doesn’t work, you lose a helmet. And I get the chance to win it back in the second race. If you win we can get something good, _and_ you keep the helmet.”

Ezra looked at the helmet again. “Fine,” he sighed. “But I get the impression you’ll be hoping I lose now.”

Hobbie shook his head. “No, of course not.” he said. “I want this to work as much as you do. I’ve just ensured that whatever happens, I win.”

“You’re an evil genius,” Ezra told him flatly. “Fine. But in the actual race, you’re not going to be so lucky.”

Hobbie frowned. “Uh… what?”

Ezra almost laughed at his confused irritation. “I’m thinking,” he explained, “that if we both bet on on the same dokma, and both win, that’ll be suspicious. One of us should bet on another one.”

Hobbie frowned and folded his arms. “And by ‘one of us’ you mean me.”

And by ‘bet on another one’ he meant lose. Or, probably lose. Depending on whether or not this worked. He shrugged apologetically. “It is _my_ helmet.”

Hobbie’s frown deepened, and then disappeared suddenly as he processed Ezra’s logic and realized that he was right. “Fine,” he said, resignedly. “I’ll bet something I don’t want, but you’ll win us both something we can share. Deal?”

He couldn’t say fairer than that. Ezra nodded in agreement. “So what are you going to bet?” he asked.

Hobbie shrugged and fished in his pocket, coming out with a ration bar of his own. “This’ll do,” he said.

Ezra looked at it doubtfully; he wasn’t sure which flavor it was, but it definitely looked like it had been in his pocket for some time, it was slightly bent out of shape, and the sealed ends appeared a little frayed. Pocket lint stuck to one end of the wrapper. “I know you said you were going to bet something you didn’t want,” Ezra said, “but wouldn’t it be better if someone else _does_ want it?”

“I _would_ have gone to get another one, but if I’m going to be losing…”

Ezra sighed. He grabbed the bar from Hobbie’s hand and offered him one of the more edible-looking ones from his stash, then he placed his remaining two bars, as well as the one he had traded with Hobbie, back in the closet. He didn’t tape them back into place, he could do that later. “Come on,” he said. He tucked the helmet under his arm and headed for the door.

* * *

The crowds were already gathering as they approached the racecourse. Its slightly out of the way location — a throwback to the time when the races had been a secret known only to a select few — meant that the way wasn’t particularly well-lit. Ordinarily, approaching on his own, Ezra might have been tempted to get out his flashlight. He wouldn’t have _done_ it, but he would have been tempted. Approaching with others, he tended to stick close and follow without being too obvious about it. Today, strangely, the overhead lights seemed a little brighter and the path was easier to walk.

Ezra glanced up at them, interested. Nobody else approaching appeared to have noticed anything, maybe it was his imagination.

Maybe his eyes were getting b…

No. It had to be his imagination.

Since the swarm had begun to move on and there were fewer dokma around, the short-lived popularity of the obstacle courses had faded and the races had become the base’s main source of entertainment again. It was still early in the evening, and people just coming off the day shift were beginning to arrive, mingling with those that worked other shifts, that had downtime for whatever reason, or worked eclectic shifts or longer missions with days in-between.

And Ezra, who currently did nothing.

Over by the track, one of the engineers that ran the races caught his eye and gave him a friendly nod. Ezra returned the gesture, then turned his attention to the dokma. They were still held in the makeshift cage that was their home during the day. The front of the mostly solid container was covered with a loose mesh through which the dokma could see out, but he could barely see them. Except for one particularly curious creature, standing near the front, poking its eye stalks through the gaps in the mesh and peering around.

Ezra reached out to the creature using the Force; not connecting fully, simply scanning it, checking which of the two kinds of dokma it was; the more docile ones that he had been practicing on, or those that already had that need to move around. If the captive creatures all had it, that would complicate matters, and he might re-consider betting the helmet. That particular dokma didn’t have it.

“He looks eager,” Hobbie said. “Maybe we should go for him. Which color do you think he is? I can’t see them in there.”

From where they were standing, Ezra couldn’t see the shell, or the color of paint that adorned it. Apparently Hobbie couldn’t either. He shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter,” he said.

“Oh,” said Hobbie suddenly. Ezra turned to look at him; he was staring down at the empty racetrack, wearing a thoughtful expression.

Ezra looked at him expectantly, waiting for more.

Hobbie cleared his throat, then looked at Ezra, back to the track, and then back to the dokma. “I… might have just thought of a problem with this whole thing.” He glanced around him, making sure that there was nobody nearby to overhear, then dropped the volume of his voice slightly. “I don’t mean now, but later on, when…” he hesitated. “If you can’t, you know, if you don’t know which color they are…”

“Yeah,” Ezra interrupted, cutting him off before he could finish. “Thought of that.” He couldn’t be certain because he hadn’t let him finish, but it seemed likely that Hobbie had finally caught up, and thought of the same problem that had occurred to Ezra almost immediately; how to make sure he was influencing the right color when he couldn’t see the colors. Or the dokma.

Or anything else.

“Thought of that,” he repeated, slowly this time, trying to deliberately _not_ think about it as he did.

Hobbie stared searchingly at him, then glanced away, looking into the distance beyond the racetrack, an area where Ezra could see nothing but black punctuated by points of light that spread into blurred halos. “Thought of a way around it?” he asked.

Ezra looked away, the damaged image of the lights an uncomfortable reminder. He looked down at his feet instead, then up again, and finally settled on the racetrack. He shrugged. “Not exactly. Working on it though.” Well, in a way. ‘Thinking about it’ might have been more accurate. ‘Trying not to think about it’ more accurate still. “Let’s just see if this works first, okay? If it doesn’t, the other stuff won’t even matter.” He tore his gaze away from the racetrack to glance at Hobbie, hoping he would drop the subject.

Hobbie hesitated, then nodded. He glanced over at the dokma, and without even trying, Ezra could sense worry and tension from him through the Force.

Well, good, because Ezra was worried too, and not just about the dokma races. It was good, in a way, to spread it around a little.

Turning his attention away from that unwelcome thought, he quickly scanned the other dokma in the cage, pleased to find that it was reasonably easy to connect to them without seeing them, as long as he had an idea of where they were. Keeping track of one wouldn’t be so much of a leap, as long as he could work out a way of knowing _which one_ to keep track of. Not one of the dokma seemed to have that urge to move on that he had sensed in the swarm.

Hobbie turned back to Ezra after a few moments. His eyes fell on the helmet tucked under his arm and he, too, seemed to shake off the thought. “I can’t believe I finally managed to get you to bet that thing,” he said, and grinned. For a moment it appeared forced, then, suddenly, it didn’t.

Ezra smiled, relieved at the change of subject. He lifted the helmet and examined it closely. “It’s an extra incentive to win, I suppose,” he told him. He glanced at the dokma. “So, I’m thinking of betting on red.” It made sense, it would be easier to keep track of; yellow was pale and could be tough to make out against the sandy-colored shells of the dokma, blue and green were sometimes difficult to differentiate, orange could be a little too much like yellow.

He didn’t bother to explain his reasoning to Hobbie, who shrugged. “I guess I’ll go for blue then.”

The fact that none of the dokma had that urge to be elsewhere was interesting. He had noticed it less and less over the past two days, but the captive dokma shouldn’t, as far as he knew, have been swapped today. Not unless the schedule had changed. He nodded in response to Hobbie, the headed over to the engineer setting up the race, the helmet still tucked under his arm.

The engineer was a human man in his mid-twenties. His pockets were stuffed full of smaller items that had been offered up for wager, the larger things on the ground nearby. He clutched a datapad in his hand, onto which he was recording the details of each bet. Ezra held the helmet aloft as he approached, and felt a pang of nervousness when the man’s eyes widened in surprise.

“You must be feeling confident tonight,” he said.

Ezra swallowed. “Uh…” he said.

Presumably sensing Ezra about to give the game away, Hobbie sprung into action. He grinned and slung an arm around Ezra’s shoulders. “He lost a personal bet,” he said, loudly. “I bet him he couldn’t eat a full bowl of the really hot chili, he foolishly thought he could. That means he has to give me a chance to win the helmet back.”

The engineer frowned. “Why didn’t you just say he had to give you it back if he lost?”

Hobbie shrugged. “You know Ezra, he’s not going to give it up that easily.”

“Yeah,” Ezra said, getting into the swing of the lie, “This way I might get to keep it.”

“You _might_ , but you won’t,” Hobbie said, sounding surprisingly convincing for someone lying through his teeth. “Blue’s gonna win for sure.”

He held his ration bar out to the engineer, who looked at it dubiously as he recorded the bet in his datapad. “Doesn’t look like you’re feeling _that_ confident,” he said.

Ezra laughed. In comparison to what Hobbie had intended to bring, that ration bar was valuable stuff.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hobbie said, turning on Ezra with a smirk, still pretending. “We’ll see how much you laugh when you lose that helmet, and I win it back in the next race.” He wandered away, keeping in character until he reached the other side of the track.

Ezra turned back to the engineer and shrugged. “He really wants this back,” he said, as he handed it over. “I’ll bet it on red.”

“How much did you manage?” the engineer asked.

The question seemed to come from nowhere, and made no sense at all. Ezra stared at him, trying to work out what he meant. “What?” he said, finally.

“The chili. I tried it yesterday, nearly took a layer off my tongue. I still can’t taste anything properly.”

“Oh,” Ezra grinned. “Yeah. It’s… yeah. I managed a half bowl.”

The man’s eyes widened in awe. “You must’ve _really_ wanted to hang onto that helmet.”

Ezra shrugged and tried to arrange his expression into something appropriate. Irritation that Hobbie had won the bet, maybe. Or nervousness about handing over the helmet. Pain from his supposedly burning mouth…

“You okay?” the engineer asked him.

“Yeah, of course.”

“What are you doing with your face?”

Ezra scowled. “Nothing!” He turned to leave, giving the helmet one last glance. If he lost it, it wasn’t the end of the world, but it did mean that he and Hobbie would have to stick around for another race, each trying to win it back.

“Hey, hang on a minute,” the engineer called after him.

He knew something was wrong. They should have stuck to betting ration bars, the helmet was a step too far. Slowly, Ezra turned back to face him.

“So, I heard you’re not going off-base at the moment. I just wanted to say, if you’re ever bored and need something to do, come find me,” the engineer told him. “There’s never any shortage of work, I know it’s not your specialty, but I’m sure I could find something you could do.”

For a moment, Ezra was so relieved that he had been wrong, that he couldn’t speak. He shrugged awkwardly, trying to gauge the man’s motivations. It seemed to be a genuine offer. He hadn’t even commented on the reason why Ezra was stuck on the base. He hadn’t carefully _not_ talked about it either, the way some people did. He had simply offered him something to do. It wasn’t the thing that he _wanted_ to be doing of course, but that wasn’t within the engineer’s power to give.

Ezra smiled, and hoped it was more convincing than whatever he had been trying to do a moment earlier. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”

Sato had returned to the base the night before, and he was the one that could put Ezra back on active duty. Hera had appeared reasonably confident that she could change Sato’s mind, and after a few days away, he might have had the opportunity to think things through anyway. Ezra’s days of having nothing to do were soon to be over anyway.

Still, he didn’t turn the offer down. It was better to keep his options open. And better not to get on the wrong side of the guy running the races.

“Oh, by the way, I made the lights a little brighter. All it took was running a bit more power to them,” the man added. “Just thought it’d be easier for everyone to see what’s going on.”

Ezra nodded, and glanced up at the lights overhead. That explained why he could see so much easier tonight. He hadn’t thought he was getting better. He definitely hadn’t. “Everyone?” he said.

“I think it’ll help everyone,” the guy said, in a tone that didn’t invite argument.

It probably wouldn’t hurt them, anyway. Ezra nodded in agreement and turned to leave again.

“I mean it about the job offer,” the engineer told him. “I could use some an extra pair of hands around here sometimes. Don’t let ‘em convince you you can’t do things.”

* * *

Ezra took a tentative sip from the small bottle that Hobbie had suggested he claim as his winnings. Something they could share and, supposedly, both enjoy. ‘Enjoy’ might have been going a little far, if Ezra was honest. He winced as he swallowed, but not as badly as the previous night when the alcohol had burned all the way down to his stomach.

“I think I’m getting used to the taste,” he said.

Hobbie laughed and reclaimed the bottle. “This is real stuff,” he said. “From that shipment bound for the Imperial fleet that we intercepted last month. It’s slightly better quality than the stuff that comes out of the still. Savor it, you’ll probably never get it again.”

Ezra’s wince deepened. “You mean this is how it’s _supposed_ to taste?”

Hobbie laughed and took a deep swig, then handed the bottle back. It was small, and half gone already. “So, the race was a close call,” he said. “Did you do that on purpose?”

Ezra put the bottle down on the ground next to him and thought back over the race. “No,” he said. It had been close, though. The uninfluenced dokma had acted predictably enough, meandering across the lanes, up and down the track, congregating in groups as though holding mid-race debriefs. The red one had acted as though it had something important to do, but couldn’t remember what it was. It had moved up and down the track restlessly, pacing across the lanes, it had tried, and failed, to climb the side of the track and gain freedom, and in the end had crossed the finish line only moments before the green.

The problem, the one that he had predicted, was that the dokma didn’t know it was in a race. It didn’t know what a racetrack was, or where it was supposed to be going. He could make one particular creature more mobile than the others, but he couldn’t tell it where to go. If another one decided to move slowly in the right direction, it would win over his, that was racing back and forth but never crossing the finish line.

“I’d have stopped the green one if it was going to win,” he said.

Hobbie gave him an odd look. “It was blue,” he said. “The one that nearly won.”

Ezra shrugged to hide his embarrassment. He had been _sure_ that was green. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I mean, I’d have stopped any other one that was going to win.”

Hobbie nodded, but Ezra couldn’t tell whether he was convinced or not.

“Really,” Ezra assured him. “I mean, I just said the wrong color.”

Hobbie reached for the bottle, on the ground between them, and took another swig. “I know,” he said. “Or, I _did_ until you said that.”

Ezra sighed. He had only had a few small sips of their winnings, and it could be his imagination, but he could swear he could feel his mind relaxing under its influence. “It’s tough to tell with you,” he said. “It turns out you’re an expert actor, which means I can never trust anything you say ever again.” He smiled, to show that he was only half-joking. “That thing you made up about the chili was…”

“Not made up,” Hobbie told him. “I just made that bet with Wedge instead, and it wasn’t for a helmet, it was just for fun. Fun for me, anyway. I’m pretty sure the reason he wasn’t here tonight is that he’s holed up somewhere still drinking water by the gallon.”

That mental image was just hilarious. The laughter burst out of him like water under pressure, exploding before slowing to a trickle. “I did wonder where he was,” he said.

“He must’ve downed a gallon of water. Seriously, if we start to run out, it’s him.” He grinned as he spoke, then sobered quickly. “You’re a pretty great actor yourself, anyway,” he said. He hesitated, rolled the bottle between his palms, keeping his gaze focussed on it as it slowly turned. “That was some top level secret keeping. How long did you hang onto it, a year?”

Confusion, and then understanding washed over Ezra. Hobbie was talking about his eyes, about the secret that he had guarded so closely, before stupidly agreeing to put it out into the world. He felt his breath catch involuntarily as discomfort settled instantly around them. He didn’t reply.

Hobbie had stopped speaking almost the instant the words had left his mouth. He stilled his hands and carefully placed the bottle on the ground between them again. “Sorry,” he said.

Ezra smoothed his expression into something neutral, and then re-formed it into an exaggerated confusion, and smiled. “For admitting how great I am?” He pushed humor that he didn’t feel into his voice. Maybe, if he just kept faking it for long enough, maybe one day it would become real. “No way. You don’t get to take that back.”

Hobbie smiled, and rolled his eyes. “Fine, you’re amazing.” he deadpanned. “Y’know, the two of us would make pretty great undercover operatives.”

Ezra smiled, while his heart sank. Even if he was re-approved for missions, his undercover days were over, or would be very soon. The Imperial military didn’t accept less than perfect specimens; why would they, when they had thousands of worlds full of able-bodied people to choose from? Okay, Ezra wasn’t going to have a scar like Kanan, but he had seen other blind people, and it was always possible to tell when a person couldn’t see, or even when they couldn’t see _well_. They didn’t — couldn’t — look you in the eye, they did things without having to look, and if you _can’t_ look, how easy would it be to remember to pretend every single time? Kanan didn’t do it; Kanan probably _couldn’t_ have done it even if he wanted to, because it sounded impossible.

Even for assignments that didn’t involve infiltrating the Imperial forces, unless Ezra could work out some way to fake it convincingly, _all the time_ , it was going to be obvious that he couldn’t see.

Somehow, that thought was just as frightening as the idea of blindness itself.

Someone who obviously couldn’t see, but acted almost as though they could — and he desperately hoped that that was what he would be able to do — would be conspicuous, and the last thing you wanted when you were undercover was to be conspicuous. That meant from now on, the only undercover assignments he was going to get would be short ones where he could wear a helmet the whole time. That, or the ones that he wouldn’t want, pretending to be someone that he was terrified of becoming.

A hand moved into his line of vision, moving rapidly down, and then up again. Ezra flinched, tensing, half expecting an attack. He turned to see Hobbie’s grinning face. “Chopper Base calling Ezra,” he said. “You zoned out for a second there. You’ve had about three sips of whiskey, so I know you’re not drunk.” As though in an attempt to rectify that, Hobbie offered him the bottle.

Ezra took it automatically. “I was just thinking about all the undercover I’ve _already_ done,” he said with a smirk. “I _am_ pretty great at it. You on the other hand… After you left like you did, the Empire’s probably got a thicker file on you and Wedge than they do on any of the rest of us. And it was recent, so you’re pretty recognizable. Give it a few years, and maybe.” Sabine had done it. But then, Sabine had been discovered…

He shrugged and took another small sip from the bottle before passing it back, done for the night. He may not be drunk, but he was an inexperienced drinker, and whether it was the alcohol or the events of the past few days, something was taking his mind down paths that he didn’t want to visit. 

“Yeah, well,” said Hobbie. “Wouldn’t want to do it anyway.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Ezra lied. He got to his feet, feeling a little unsteady. He wondered whether the drink had had more of an effect than he realized. “I’m gonna go,” he said. “Got a long day of doing nothing tomorrow, I want to be well rested for it.”

Hobbie looked at him thoughtfully, then stood as well. He placed the lid back on the half-full bottle and offered it to Ezra. “You did all the work,” he said. “You might as well have most of the prize.”

Ezra declined with a shake of his head. “Keep it,” he said. “There’s no way Zeb wouldn’t take that off me that the moment I walked through the door. The stuff’s disgusting anyway.”

Hobbie shrugged and pocketed the bottle. “I’ll keep it for next time,” he promised. He jogged a couple of steps to get ahead of Ezra, then began to walk in the direction of the Ghost.

Ezra stopped. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“No fun sitting here by myself,” Hobbie told him with a dismissive shrug. “I’m going the same way as you, might as well go together.”

Ezra glanced at Hobbie, just a few steps ahead of him, easily visible due to his proximity and the higher than normal ambient light level, but not obviously guiding him. He glanced at the path ahead, and saw very little. He could find his way without help, and he wouldn't accept help if it was offered, but if Hobbie happened to be walking in the same direction, there was no reason not to stick close.

Just as long as Hobbie didn’t tell him what he was actually doing, that was just fine.

He glanced back at the racetrack as they left. It had worked. Maybe not as well as he had hoped, but he had influenced the result of the race. He had won when he had probably been going to lose. Now, all he had to do was do it again, perfect it, make it better. And more importantly, learn how to track the dokma without seeing them, so he could enjoy the races even when he wasn’t cheating. That was going to be the difficult part, and the part that he didn’t want to have to do. But still, small victories.

He still had time; the rest could wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are loved ♥


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